Eight months after American forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, Chevron announced plans to invest more than $7 billion in Venezuela. The American oil company intends to more than double its production in the country over five years. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves but produces only around 1.25 million barrels a day. Its petroleum industry has been devastated by mismanagement, corruption, underinvestment, the loss of technical expertise and America

The seizure of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro by the United States marks a profound rupture with the legal and normative constraints that have structured international order since 1945. Whatever the moral judgment of Maduro’s regime, the episode raises a far more consequential question: on what grounds can a sovereign head of state be forcibly removed by another country, and what follows when law is replaced by power? The Stated Grounds and the Evidentiary Problem The T